Nervous SCANA officials played along with the inept cover-up efforts and passed on false and inaccurate information to regulators. It states that the defendant made “false and misleading statements” and “knowingly devised a scheme” to continue the project based on misrepresentations via Westinghouse to the owners, state regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission, investors, and ratepayers. The indictment reveals important new information about how Benjamin and Westinghouse conspired to hide crucial information about reactor completion dates from the owners, the publicly held utility SCANA, now defunct, and its junior partner, the state-owned South Carolina Public Service Authority (known as Santee Cooper). VC Summer abandoned AP1000 reactor site, with partially constructed turbine buildings and reactor containment buildings Tim Mousseau ©2018. The project was initiated in May 2008 and gained final approval in February 2009.Īccording to the 18-page indictment, former Senior Vice President of New Plants and Major Projects Jeffrey Benjamin “had first-line responsibility for Westinghouse’s nuclear reactors worldwide.” He was charged, according to a news release, “with sixteen felony counts including conspiracy, wire fraud, securities fraud, and causing a publicly-traded company to keep a false record.” On August 30, the US attorney’s office announced that Benjamin would be arraigned on August 31. The charges outline “the scheme” to cover up key details about the problem-plagued project to construct two 1,100 megawatt (MW) Westinghouse AP1000 light-water reactors at the VC Summer site north of Columbia. On August 18, 2021, a second Westinghouse official was charged in a federal grand jury indictment filed with the court in Columbia, South Carolina.
These filings are proving to be the best documentation so far of criminal behavior related to projects that were part of a much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” that began in the early-2000s but has since petered out in the United States.
But it has fallen to the United States Attorney for South Carolina to outline internal decisions that led to project abandonment-via court filings, plea agreements, and indictments. The South Carolina legislature conducted hearings about the project’s collapse. The ill-fated construction of new nuclear reactors in South Carolina-one of two such troubled Westinghouse reactor construction projects in the United States-was abruptly terminated on July 31, 2017, but the effort to determine legal accountability for the project’s colossal failure is only now hitting its stride.
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